Public Record Research Articles

The public relations paradox of erasure: Damnatio memoriae as public relations strategy and tactic

Public relations scholars study how organizations co-create meaning with engaged stakeholders. Not well understood is how and why such co-creation modifies shared meaning, amplifies change, and even “erases” some piece of memory from the public record with the purpose of redirecting and redefining societal narratives. To help establish erasure as a concept for studying public relations, we draw from Freud’s theory of memory to establish a foundation upon which to critique strategic erasure. We adapt Freud’s theory of memory into the intersecting critique of visual rhetoric as public relations by analyzing, via narrative inquiry, remnants of Imperial Rome that have been modified, amplified, but even erased to present Rome’s modern identity. For centuries, even during Imperial Rome, leaders practiced damnatio memoriae —a modern Latin phrase that means “condemnation of memory.” We use this concept to interrogate the public relations identity process Rome’s leaders have used to modify for emphasis and even obliterate Roman elites’ names and images from the texts of public records by destroying, mutilating and modifying statues and monuments as a means for co-creating new public memory. Such analysis reveals how damnatio memoriae helps elites to redefine the “memory” of the Eternal City.

Avaliação de documentos de arquivo: uma análise de diferentes abordagens

Objetivo: Apresenta os resultados de pesquisa de mestrado em Ciência da Informação e tem como objetivo geral sistematizar e articular, em suas perspectivas teóricas e metodológicas, as proposições de autores de diferentes abordagens sobre a avaliação de documentos no âmbito da Arquivística. Método: Análise de Conteúdo Qualitativa, tendo, como base empírica, quatro textos de diferentes abordagens sobre avaliação de documentos: “A Avaliação dos Documentos Públicos Modernos” de Theodore Schellenberg; Macro-appraisal and functional analysis: documenting governance rather than government de Terry Cook; Improving Our Disposition: Documentation Strategy de Helen Samuels; e “A avaliação em Arquivística: reformulação teórico prática de uma operação metodológica” de Armando Malheiro Silva e Fernanda Ribeiro. Resultado: verificou-se que todos os autores analisados consideram que é inviável a preservação da totalidade de documentos e que a avaliação é o meio adequado para gerenciar o grande volume de documentos produzidos e acumulados pelas organizações. Verificou-se ainda que as quatro abordagens convergem, no que diz respeito à preservação de uma parcela de documentos que seja significativa, de alguma forma, à memória social. No entanto, divergem quanto aos fatores que definem a significância desses documentos, quais sejam: o seu potencial para pesquisas futuras; o valor que a sociedade atribui aos documentos; a capacidade de documentar um tópico ou área; ou sua capacidade de rentabilizar a memória institucional. Conclusões: As quatro abordagens dialogam entre si, direta ou indiretamente, por meio da negação, assimilação, replicação, reafirmação, adaptação e/ou ressignificação de ideias sobre os diferentes aspectos da avaliação de documentos.

Effectiveness of Appraisal of Public Records in Tanzania: Findings from President’s Office Records and Archives Management Department (PO-RAMD)

This article discusses the effectiveness of appraisal of public records in Tanzania. It addresses the ineffectiveness of public records appraisal in various offices in Tanzania and come up with the best approaches for the exercise on regard of the country guidelines, policies, laws and standards. Data were collected through interview, questionnaire and documentary review. A sample of 52 respondents was purposively selected. The findings revealed that Micro and Macro appraisal were common methods used to appraise records; it was also observed that the organization lacked integration between archivists and records creators especially during appraisal process. Further, it was explored that no specific schedules, policies and standards used during appraisal process. Furthermore, it was discovered that the observed deficiencies affected proper appraisal of public records. The article recommends that, appropriate measures like training and technical supports should be taken by RAMD and government to improve appraisal of public records. Key words : Records appraisal, Approaches, Archivist, Creator, Records value, Business activity DOI : 10.7176/IKM/9-5-04 Publication date :May 31 st 2019

Tax Controversy Corner: The Internal Revenue Code Injunction Statutes

Under the injunction statutes in the Internal Revenue Code, the U.S. government has broad discretion to seek—and the federal courts to order—the injunction of the preparation of false or fraudulent returns, as well as the aiding and abetting of false tax returns, and the promotion of abusive tax shelters. This power includes enjoining persons and businesses from engaging in specific conduct, and other equitable remedies, such as requiring preparers and promoters to turn over their clients’ identities, notify their clients of the injunction, and disgorgement of fees. The injunction statutes provide a powerful civil enforcement tool for the Department of Justice and the IRS. In many ways, the injunction action is a much worse consequence for a tax promoter or preparer than civil penalties because the action is part of the public record (unlike the results of a preparer or promoter audit, which would be subject to taxpayer confidentiality under Code Sec. 6103), and the court may shut down the preparer’s practice altogether. This column discusses the injunction statutes and two recent cases filed against alleged tax shelter promoters.

The Prohibition against Torture: Why the UK Government is Falling Short and the Risks that Remain

AbstractWhile the UK's official position is that it neither uses nor condones torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT), it is now a matter of public and parliamentary record that UK security services and military personnel colluded in rendition, torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, both as part of the CIA's Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) programme, at military detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, and through involvement in the detention and interrogation of prisoners by allied security forces. This paper will explain why the government is falling short of its obligations under international law, and why considerable risks remain that UK intelligence and security services will continue to collude in torture and CIDT.

Bathrooms as a Homeless Rights Issue

Bathrooms are a bellwether of equality. Segregated bathrooms were at the center of the Civil Rights movement. Accessible bathrooms were at the heart of the Disability Rights movement. Now, gender-neutral bathrooms or bathrooms assigned by gender, rather than sex, are at the heart of the Transgender Rights movement. This article is the first to examine the right to access bathrooms as it relates to the homeless community. The article explores the current paradox where cities, counties, and states provide few, if any, public bathrooms for the homeless community and the public at large, while criminalizing public urination and defecation. To better understand this paradox, the article contains two original multi-jurisdictional surveys. The first reviews the prohibitions on public urination and defecation in the 10 municipalities with the most homeless individuals. The second explores the Freedom of Information Act and Public Record Act responses of those municipalities to requests for information regarding the public bathrooms they operate and potential barriers to use for homeless individuals (e.g. closing in the evenings or particular seasons, charging a fee for entry, being located in buildings requiring identification for entry, etc.). The article contextualizes the paradox in relation to human dignity, public health, and the historical use of bathroom access as an exercise of power. It contends that the current scheme denies homeless individuals a basic sense of dignity, while undermining the health and safety justification for prohibitions on public urination and defecation by failing to operate public restrooms. The article further argues that government actors use bathrooms to marginalize the homeless community in the same way that they have used them to marginalize women, people of color, individuals with disabilities, and transgender individuals. In exploring this use of power, the article argues that prohibitions on public urination and defecation are part of a larger trend of criminalizing homelessness and the evolution of segregation. Finally, the article evaluates potential solutions to the paradox. The solutions reviewed include increasing the availability and accessibility of public restrooms, leveraging private industry, and reforming or challenging the law. The article concludes that any long-term solution to the problem requires an examination of the paradox through the lens of the homeless community.

Assessing a golden opportunity: CEO performance at McDonald’s

Assessing a golden opportunity: CEO performance at McDonald’s

Residential mobility in early childhood and the impact on misclassification in pesticide exposures

Studies of environmental exposures and childhood cancers that rely on records often only use maternal address at birth or address at cancer diagnosis to assess exposures in early childhood, possibly leading to exposure misclassification and questionable validity due to residential mobility during early childhood.Our objective was to assess patterns and identify factors that may predict residential mobility in early childhood, and examine the impact of mobility on early childhood exposure assessment for agriculturally applied pesticides and childhood cancers in California.We obtained the addresses at diagnosis of all childhood cancer cases born in 1998–2011 and diagnosed at 0–5 years of age (n = 6478) from the California Cancer Registry (CCR), and their birth addresses from linked birth certificates. Controls were randomly selected from California birth records and frequency matched (20:1) to all cases by year of birth. We obtained residential histories from a public-record database LexisNexis for both case (n = 3877 with age at diagnosis 1–5 years) and control (n = 99,262) families. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to assess the socio-demographic factors in relation to residential mobility in early childhood. We employed a Geographic Information System (GIS)-based system to estimate children's first year of life exposures to agriculturally applied pesticides based on birth vs diagnosis address or residential histories based upon Lexis-Nexis Public Records and assessed agreement between exposure measures using Spearman correlations and kappa statistics.Over 20% of case and control children moved in their first year of life, and 55% of children with cancer moved between birth and diagnosis. Older age at diagnosis, younger maternal age, lower maternal education, not having a Hispanic ethnic background, use of public health insurance, and non-metropolitan residence at birth were predictors of higher residential mobility. There was moderate to strong correlation (Spearman correlation = 0.76–0.83) and good agreement (kappa = 0.75–0.81) between the first year of life exposure estimates for agricultural pesticides applied within 2 km of a residence relying on an address at birth or at diagnosis or LexisNexis addresses; this did not differ by outcome status, but agreement decreased with decreasing buffer size, and increasing distance moved or age at diagnosis.These findings suggest that residential addresses collected at one point in time may represent residential history in early childhood to a reasonable extent; nevertheless, they exposure misclassification in the first year of life remains an issue. Also, the highest proportion of women not captured by LexisNexis were Hispanic women born in Mexico and those living in the lowest SES neighborhoods, i.e. possibly those with the higher environmental exposures, as well as younger women and those with less than high school education.Though LexisNexis only captures a sub-population, its data may be useful for augmenting address information and assessing the extent of exposure misclassification when estimating environmental exposures in large record linkage studies. Future research should investigate how to correct for exposure misclassification introduced by residential mobility that is not being captured by records.

3076 Findings from the first year of California’s Workplace Violence Prevention in Healthcare standard (Title 8, Section 3342)

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: This research project aims to: 1) describe the incidents of workplace violence that have been reported to CalOSHA through the Workplace Violent Incident Reporting System for Hospitals; 2) determine if there are any relationships between the types of violent incidents reported and the unit or hospital where the event occurred; 3) describe what mitigation strategies facility representatives report having utilized immediately following a violent incident, such as changes to practice or involvement of law enforcement. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Reports submitted to CalOSHA pursuant to the Workplace Violent Incident Reporting System for Hospitals are considered public record and are available through the state’s Public Records Act (PRA) mandate. Records from 7/1/17 – 9/30/18 were obtained through the CalOSHA PRA request process. Descriptive statistics and correlations were calculated using Stata. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Records reporting 11,116 individual events of violence were analyzed. These results do not include reports submitted by the five California State Hospitals, a group of facilities which treated nearly 13,000 patients in 2017, many of whom have a psychiatric diagnosis and are undergoing treatment mandated by judicial decision. For each record, 111 variables were reported, including description of the event itself, characteristics of the workers involved, factors which may have triggered the event, and what measures were taken to mitigate the situation during and after the incident. All events identified an aggressor; 10,357 (93%) described this individual as a patient. 11,048 reports had a unit or hospital location listed to describe where the incident occurred. Of these, 9393 (84.5%) were inpatient, behavioral health, or surgical units. A physical injury was reported in 3672 events (33%) and stress/psychological impairment was reported in 536 (5%) of the incidents. Police officers were deployed to the scene following the incident in 1122 (10%) of reported events, resulting in arrest of the perpetrator in 402 (3.6%) of the reported incidents. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: While the impulse to address the high prevalence of workplace violence towards healthcare providers has led to deserved attention from policy makers, safety regulators, and healthcare unions, plans for ensuring that new initiatives are achieving their desired effect for workers have yet to fully materialize. An ongoing concern is that incidents are known to be under-reported through official mechanisms, leading to challenges in determining the scope of the problem itself and evaluating the efficacy of interventions to address it. CalOSHA’s new reporting requirement and online interface provides a new channel for improving validity of prevalence data, as early findings indicate that less serious events are being reported through the system. In addition, information describing how hospital leaders report responding to incidents in their immediate aftermath will provide needed insight into what additional efforts are needed to support victims of violence given the unique challenges present in the healthcare industry.

On the value of preprints: An early career researcher perspective.

Peer-reviewed journal publication is the main means for academic researchers in the life sciences to create a permanent public record of their work. These publications are also the de facto currency for career progress, with a strong link between journal brand recognition and perceived value. The current peer-review process can lead to long delays between submission and publication, with cycles of rejection, revision, and resubmission causing redundant peer review. This situation creates unique challenges for early career researchers (ECRs), who rely heavily on timely publication of their work to gain recognition for their efforts. Today, ECRs face a changing academic landscape, including the increased interdisciplinarity of life sciences research, expansion of the researcher population, and consequent shifts in employer and funding demands. The publication of preprints, publicly available scientific manuscripts posted on dedicated preprint servers prior to journal-managed peer review, can play a key role in addressing these ECR challenges. Preprinting benefits include rapid dissemination of academic work, open access, establishing priority or concurrence, receiving feedback, and facilitating collaborations. Although there is a growing appreciation for and adoption of preprints, a minority of all articles in life sciences and medicine are preprinted. The current low rate of preprint submissions in life sciences and ECR concerns regarding preprinting need to be addressed. We provide a perspective from an interdisciplinary group of ECRs on the value of preprints and advocate their wide adoption to advance knowledge and facilitate career development.

The ichthyology collection at the Natural History Museum of El Salvador(MUHNES): Species checklist and new country records.

The ichthyology collection at the Natural History Museum of El Salvador (MUHNES) was established in 1970. Herein, we provide the first quantitative and qualitative description of the collection; and the first public record of the specimens and taxa therein represented. The MUHNES fish collection is the largest and most important of El Salvador, hosting 3791 specimens in 1005 lots representing 26 orders, 75 families, 159 genera and 248 species from both marine and freshwater environments, including larval, juvenile and mainly adult specimens. MUHNES specimens include 39% of the 587 species reported in the official national checklist of fishes of El Salvador, and support the inclusion of 47 additional species for a new total of 634. Furthermore, MUHNES specimens support (1) the occurrence of Cathorops fuerthii along the coast of El Salvador, extending its distribution from northern Costa Rica; (2) the occurrence of Atherinella starksi in El Salvador, reducing a gap for records between Nicaragua and México and (3) the extension in the distribution range of Profundulus kreiseri to Morazán, El Salvador. This study represents an advance on the understanding of diversity and distribution of the national ichthyofauna.

The last forum of accountability? State secrecy, intelligence and freedom of information in the United Kingdom

The official mechanisms of intelligence oversight and accountability in the United Kingdom are arguably disjointed and ineffective. Thus, informal actors such as journalists, have played a more significant role. In addition, a rise of whistleblowers and leakers, such as Chelsea Manning, have highlighted the importance of online archives as an avenue for accountability. The United Kingdom is legally bound to place official documents on the public record at the National Archives. Sensitive material on intelligence and other security subjects majorly impedes the bulk release of documents. Inevitably, the inclination to ‘weed’ sensitive material from mundane documents has resulted in a costly declassification process. Evidence suggests that historians successfully investigated these subjects through the use of archives, despite the efforts of officials to obfuscate. This article argues that historians increasingly constitute the last forum of accountability and that routine declassification is an important, but neglected aspect of our machinery of intelligence oversight.

Early History of Micro and Meso Dialogue between Muslims and Non-Muslims in Australia

Interfaith dialogue has been touted as a means to solve many of the religious divisions that have arisen in an increasingly global and multi-faith society. In Australia, now a multi-cultural and multi faith society, a range of organisations exist to facilitate this dialogue, most coming in to existence after the 1960’s This paper will review the early dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims as portrayed in the public record. It covers pre and post-Colonial Australia, up until the 1950’s. As inter-faith dialogue becomes more important in an increasingly global society, it will examine the effect that micro and meso level dialogue has influenced social harmony at some levels. By examining the public record and the narratives surrounding the Macassans, Afghans and other early Muslims, this paper will firstly argue that micro and meso dialogue prior to the 1950s’ between Muslims immigrants and non-Muslims made a contribution to the social harmony in Australia. Secondly, despite many attempts by Muslims, meso level dialogue was often ineffective and sometimes failed for a variety of reasons. Additionally, it will point to the need for further research in order to paint a complete picture of the levels of dialogue between Muslims and others throughout Australian history.

Blockchain and Identity Persistence

The unique value proposition of 'smart contracts' based on blockchain technology is the creation of a permanent public record of agreed-upon transactions that cannot be changed retroactively. Though this is attractive in terms of reducing the potential for fraud, a person entering into a smart contract pre-commits both their current self and their future selves, no matter what changes occur to them or to their circumstances. The advantages of such pre-commitments can be substantial, but even in an age of increasing adoption of distributed ledger technologies, self-reinvention remains important. From a surveillance perspective, it is important to prevent governments from reliably associating a particular cryptoasset transaction with a particular person. For individuals, it is important to preserve the ability to assume new identities both formally and informally. This book chapter encourages an expanded and refined understanding of what it means for a blockchain use case to protect privacy, and in particular, how such use cases can encourage a notion of personal identity that is inflexible and matches poorly with individuals' notions regarding their identities. We review several proposed use cases (marriage, money laundering prevention and criminal justice record-keeping) that present this problem in an especially acute form, and highlight good practices to preserve space for self-reinvention.

Money is more than memory

Impersonal exchange is the hallmark of an advanced society and money is one key institution that supports it. Economic theory regards money as a crude arrangement for monitoring counterparts’ past conduct. If so, then a public record of past actions—or memory—should supersede the function performed by money. This intriguing theoretical postulate remains untested. In an experiment, we show that the suggested functional equivalence between money and memory does not translate into an empirical equivalence: money removed the incentives to free ride, while memory did not. Monetary systems performed a richer set of functions than just revealing past behaviors.

Massive Faculty Donations and Institutional Conflicts of Interest

Most research universities have concrete policies for navigating the conflicts of interest of faculty members. Policies that might constrain university administrators acting on behalf of their schools, so-called institutional conflicts of interest, are absent or poorly developed at most places that could benefit from them. Researchers have argued for the illustration of institutional conflicts as a foundation for policy development. Here, we show the failure of research accountability when a faculty member made massive gifts to a leading American public research university, the University of Washington in Seattle, thereby creating allegiances that undermined commitments to academic values. Correspondence, some from thousands of pages acquired through the Washington State Public Records Act, show faculty colleagues, department chairs, deans, a provost, presidents, and the Board of Regents soliciting and accepting the donor's money but not sufficiently guarding the integrity of science when that was required. These records offer a rare look inside a university scientific misconduct investigation, a process typically shrouded in secrecy under the guise of confidentiality. They amount to a forensic analysis of what can go wrong with science at the nexus of a secret history of misconduct, spectacularly ambitious science, and large donations. The inabilities of federal and state authorities to reckon with institutional conflicts of interest are highlighted. The collective inaction can be understood within Lessig’s framework of institutional corruption. The failings described herein are metaphorical holes in the safety net intended to protect the integrity of American science, a shared practice that is under increasing strain. All public records are available from the authors upon request. Those cited here are included in an appendix posted by the journal.

A Tribute to Priscilla Meyer

A Tribute to Priscilla Meyer Zoran Kuzmanovich (bio) In this tribute I will limit myself to Priscilla's 35 years of intelligent and devoted service to the cause of the Nabokov society and Nabokov scholarship. Priscilla has authored over 50 publications on Nabokov, made over fifty public appearances as a Nabokov expert, and taught some of this country's most innovative courses on Nabokov's work. She has twice presided over the Nabokov society, and since 2001 she has been the editor of The Nabokovian's feature "Notes and Brief Commentaries." Both her scholarship and her teaching have won national prizes. The rest of Priscilla's CV is on the Wesleyan website. However enviable such a list of achievements, the CV is a matter of public record, and like most public records, it fails to make clear what Priscilla's day-to-day presence as a teacher and scholar means to her students and colleagues. The CV also fails abysmally to give the proper measure of the woman since all those titles, functions, awards and honors were used by Priscilla to promote Wesleyan University and Vladimir Nabokov, not Priscilla Meyer. But Priscilla Meyer is a person who stands out among us by her bravery, originality, and generosity. Let's take each in turn. Priscilla was not intimidated by Nabokov's protestations that he was immune to influence nor his interdicts regarding the connection between his fictions and his private life. Priscilla's first book on Nabokov proceeded from her assumption that Pale Fire on one very important level is an encoded autobiography, and that it had been influenced by things Nordic: "The attempt to make sense of his father's assassination is the ultimate moving force behind Nabokov's exploration of the history, literature, natural evolution, and language of the North" (5). So what the sailor has hidden is really Nabokov's "immortalized love for his father in a series of reflections on martyred royalty in history and art." Priscilla's bravery is also evident in her reviews especially where she points out the difference between the well-wrought and the overwrought. Yet her own prose is remarkably free of two faults that plague much of scholarly writing on Nabokov. The first of these is the unconscious adoption of vocabulary and cadences that imitate Nabokov's own writing; and the second is calculated incoherence that often passes for profundity. In fact Priscilla's skill at sympathetic exposition is such that the ideas of others can sometimes seem more interesting in her reviews than they were in the original. Clarity for her is a moral obligation even in the world some of us glumly, some of us glibly, and some of us gullibly refer to as "constructed." Her originality can be summed up by one of her own phrases: "cultural synthesis." It unites her scholarship and her teaching, and it provides her students with tools and attitudes they need to function as literate readers. Cultural synthesis is not reducible to encyclopedic annotation or a study of influences. Done right, it requires its practitioner to discover in Nabokov's narratives phonetic, rhetorical, syntactic or semantic patterns whose expression is marked by their differences from what seems to be Nabokov's normative prose. The discovery has to be followed by the identification of the underlying text and an explanation of its functioning within ontological layers of the Nabokov texts. The professor could of course furnish such linkages. And with her knowledge of French and Russian literature, Priscilla was in a position to do precisely that. She chose not to do so, knowing all along that students rarely read by the flashes of lightning that emanate from their professor's witty forehead. In turn, her students realized that great teaching makes the students seek out more learning, not more professor. Finally, we come to Priscilla's generosity. When a scholar divided between himself and Mrs. Nabokov all the credit for discovering Nabokov's "two-world" cosmology, Priscilla offered the mildest of protests by merely pointing out she and Don Johnson had that been publishing on the two-world thesis for almost a decade. I know my protest would not have been so mild because...

Case Number 87-447: An Image Essay in 12 Parts

Author(s): Flessa, Nick | Abstract: With these twelve images I propose Janna Flessa's personal archive in relation to her public record as a generative space for creating a more critical historical vision regarding the function of the judicial system and the cultural contexts of mental illness, gender and race in the United States.

Public Records, Credit Scores, and Credit Performance

Public Records, Credit Scores, and Credit Performance

I’m Dr. Red Duke by Bryant Boutwell

Reviewed by: I’m Dr. Red Duke by Bryant Boutwell Megan Seaholm I’m Dr. Red Duke. By Bryant Boutwell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. 284. Photographs, notes, sources, index.) Bryant Boutwell has written an engaging biography of Texas surgeon Dr. Red Duke, a “one-of-a kind made-in-Texas original . . . the Marlboro Man, Albert Schweitzer, and Teddy Roosevelt all in one” (1). His life story is an account of dedication to service, ambition, and adventure that yielded a stunning list of awards. Boutwell provides a list of Duke’s accomplishments in his introduction. Among these are medical missionary to Afghanistan; creator of Memorial Hermann Life Flight, the first air ambulance service in Texas; conservationist; Alaska hunting guide; army [End Page 132] tank commander; and a television personality whose health reports were syndicated worldwide (2). Boutwell organizes his biography around episodes in Duke’s life. Along the way, he provides fascinating histories of developments in trauma medicine and the institutional histories of two of Texas’s finest medical centers, University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas and the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. Boutwell’s publication is the only book-length biography about Duke. Born in 1928 in the small railroad town of Ennis to James Henry Duke and Helen Donegan Duke, devout Baptists, he soon became known as “Red” because of his thick red hair. He spoke with a thick Texas drawl, and his speech was peppered with folksy expressions like “happy as a pig in slop” (101). In 1953, Duke matriculated at the new and growing Southwestern Medical School in Dallas and specialized in surgery. In 1963, he and a fellow resident attended to Texas Governor John Connally, who had been shot in the chest during the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas and rushed to Parkland Hospital. After serving on the Southwestern faculty, Duke moved to New York City to contribute to research in the Surgical Metabolism Unit at the Columbia University Medical Center. Two years later, he, his wife, and their four children moved to Afghanistan to serve on the faculty of a new medical school. His next and final move was back to Texas, where he joined the inaugural faculty of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston; he served there from 1972 until his death, at age 86, in 2015. Boutwell describes Duke as an inspirational teacher and role model for thousands of medical students, constantly reminding them that the patient was always the most important person in the room. He is remembered by many for his eighteen years presenting the televised program Texas Health Reports, which began as a production of the University of Texas. His signature closing was “from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, I’m Dr. Red Duke” (180). Boutwell is thorough, drawing on more than thirty interviews with Duke and his colleagues, friends, and family as well as diaries, letters and the public record. At times Boutwell’s detail felt a bit tedious, but it is descriptive of Duke’s character. For example, we learn that Red Duke went to seminary to please his father. His time with his wife and family must have been limited, but they were there for him at the end. They all gathered around his hospital bed, saying the Lord’s Prayer. Red provided a final “Amen” (238) before he died. [End Page 133] Megan Seaholm University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association